Dr Darowski, lead clinician for the North East and West Yorkshire Paediatric Critical Care Network, said longer distances could be devastating, especially for babies born with one particular serious heart defect.

“These babies, whose outcome is excellent with timely treatment, require time-critical transfers and increasing the journey times may result in some avoidable deaths,” he said in a report.

He told the Leeds meeting the concern had not been taken into account properly when the decision was made: “Risk increases with distance and that fact was completely ignored.”

Councillors quizzed him about the impact on the Freeman Hospital in Newcastle if parents from Yorkshire refused to travel there, so it might not reach the required number of operations.

“There is undoubtedly a problem around the sustainability of the service in Newcastle,” he said.

“In my view the whole of the review has been driven by the view that Newcastle needs to be made sustainable.”

The board also discussed claims that health chiefs diverted millions of pounds away from Yorkshire, while money was pumped into the North East.

As reported last month in the Yorkshire Evening Post, analysis by Leeds councillor John Illingworth showed Yorkshire received disproportionately less funding from the National Specialised Commissioning Team – which proposed closing the LGI unit.

NHS bosses have previously said the figures were “flawed” and yesterday councillors on the committee agreed to ask NHS heads for an explanation.

In response to the latest claims, a spokesman for the Safe and Sustainable review said: “Dr Darowski’s analysis is flawed because it fails to recognise that in an emergency a child with heart disease from Yorkshire will continue to be collected by the highly specialist team based in Barnsley.

“Parents, patients and clinicians told us consistently during public consultation that quality of care, not journey times, should be the most important factor.”